San Francisco billionaire Tom Steyer is reportedly interested in bankrolling “ban fracking” activists in Colorado. This is just the latest evidence of national environmental groups and the ultra-rich playing extreme political games with our economy, state budget and the livelihoods of working families.

Six months ago, “ban fracking” activists openly mocked the suggestion that national environmental groups backed by wealthy donors were behind several local-level campaigns against oil and gas development in Northern Colorado. They called it “laughable” and “obviously ridiculous.”

Now, the liberal political blog Colorado Pols says Tom Steyer – the hedge-fund manager who has pledged to spend and raise $100 million this election cycle to advance his environmental agenda – is the latest Big Green donor to consider funding anti-fracking activism in Colorado:

“Colorado Pols has learned that representatives for Tom Steyer were in Colorado … to discuss Steyer’s potential involvement in both the Senate race and a possible ballot measure related to concerns about fracking safety.”

“Advisers to Steyer’s NextGen Climate nonprofit, which maintains an affiliated super political action committee that can raise and spend unlimited funds, visited Colorado last week for ‘a series of meetings with political, community and enviro leaders in the state,’ according to a source with knowledge of the group’s schedule.”

The Ithaca, New York-based foundation has given $6 million to the “ban fracking” movement, according to Inside Philanthropy. For Park Foundation president Adelaide Park Gomer, daughter of the late Roy Park, this is a personal battle. In a 2011 speech to environmental activists, she said the goal of the Park Foundation’s “ban fracking” work was to keep oil and gas development away from Ithaca, the rest of New York, and eventually ban it across America:

“Nothing short of a total ban can save us from this unfolding tragedy! We believe that New York must become the first state to ban fracking, taking a leadership role that the rest of the country can then rally behind.”

Colorado’s “ban fracking” activists have successfully misled the public, elected officials and the news media into believing they are just a loose coalition of poorly-funded local citizens who represent the state’s pragmatic political center. So far, they have laughed off the mounting evidence that the “ban fracking” campaign is almost totally supported by fringe environmental groups, clueless celebrities and ultra-rich activists who represent a very narrow and very extreme set of special interests. Not only is the “ban fracking” agenda too extreme for the sensible middle of Colorado politics, it has even been judged too extreme by the leaders of the state’s Democratic Party, including Gov. John Hickenlooper.

Activist donors like Steyer, Ono, Ruffalo, Park and Polis are so rich they will never feel the consequences of effectively shutting down domestic oil and natural gas production in America – which is what a ban on hydraulic fracturing would do. They have made their money already, so they don’t need a job to pay the mortgage, buy health insurance, or save for college. Skyrocketing energy prices won’t stop them from heating their homes in winter, cooling their homes in summer, driving wherever they wish or flying from coast to coast and continent to continent.

Colorado’s working families – whether their paycheck comes from the oil and gas industry or not – do not have that kind of luxury. They have to make ends meet, and a lot of times, it’s a struggle. The “ban fracking” agenda will only make that struggle even harder, and that’s why Coloradans deserve to know who’s really behind the “ban fracking” campaign, what these people really want, and what it will really mean for our state.

In the meantime, we can only hope Tom Steyer and Jared Polis think twice before they bankroll the permanent expansion of this angry and extreme strain of environmental campaigning into Colorado. When an industry supports more than 110,000 Colorado jobs, almost $30 billion of economic activity, $1.6 billion in tax revenue and energy bills 23 percent lower than the national average, responsible leaders don’t help political activists who are trying to wipe that industry out.

Simon Lomax serves as Western director of Energy In Depth, a research and education program of the Independent Petroleum Association of America. He is based in Denver, Colo. Before joining EID, Simon was a newspaper, trade-press and wire-service reporter for 15 years. As a journalist, he spent almost a decade covering the energy and environment beat in Washington, D.C., and also worked in the ...

I have a feeling that if ALEC, Koch Industries, Heritage.org, etc. stopped attacking the renewable energy industry, Tom Steyer would lose interest in backing it. Why not suggest everyone stop contributing to the political issues relating to energy, and let the chips fall where they may? If that happened we would be a lot closer to a free market.

And while we are at it, why not stop support subsidies for energy companies, and make everyone pay for cleaning up their own messes?

This is a great article. Anti-fracking activists are borderline lunatic fringe. They all want to do away with fracking, oil, gas, or coal, but they all have no problems using materials daily that are made from these services and inevitably, their hypocrisy reigns supreme.

Alternatives are rarely mentioned, save for the standard chants of "renewables!" Yet, no viable means to achieving that are ever offered... just scrap that, employ this, and we'll all live happily ever after.

They're as funded from their own special interest groups as oil companies are, but they cry foul and mention the Koch brothers anytime a pro-oil/gas/coal agenda is pushed.

They are to environmental causes as Nirvana was to music... a neat idea at the time which gained traction with angst-ridden people because it was the "hip" thing to do, yet were annoying in their heyday and unbearable to listen to.

One can only hope "fracktivists" will be as irrelevant 20 years down the road, too.

Few assertions are more maliciously deceptive than the claim that people who advocate a shift to renewable energy while using fossil fuels are hypocrites.

There are some things we all need to do together or not at all. If all my neighbors throw their trash in street, but I pay to have mine collected, there is still trash in the street and I'm just paying for a service without achieving the end goal.

The emission of CO2, methane, soot, and noxious gases, is just like tossing trash in the street, or out the car window (something that used to be quite common before the anti-litter campaign and fines for doing so).

What we have now is what economists call the tragedy of the commons. The only solution is some collective agreement to respect the commons. Otherwise, people who forgo the use of the commons in the hopes of avoiding tragedy are just played for fools by the individuals who have no respect for common property. If environmentalists stop using fossil fuels, people who care nothing for the environment will simply say "great, more for me" and slurp up all the available resources while dumping the byproducts into the common atmosphere.

Every cleanup effort in history, such as the drive to improve sanitation and thereby eliminate diseases like cholera, has met with resistance by people unwilling to contribute to the common good. But in the end, most people realized the need for responsibility and sometime after the new laws were adopted, people accepted them as natural. Even today's "libertarians" who resent government do not claim a natural right to dispose of their trash in the streets. It's just people in the fossil fuel industry not wanting to admit that the byproducts of fossil fuel combustion are trash.

I think they need to step up, accept that these byproducts are like trash, and engage in a reasonable migration to sustainable practices for the common good.

All the benefits of modern society have required large capital investments and economies of scale, which renewable energy systems are only beginning to achieve, and which can only progress with the participation of the majority of citizens.

Advocating a migration to sustainable practices while continuing to participate in an unsustainable system is not hypocritical

" It's just people in the fossil fuel industry not wanting to admit that the byproducts of fossil fuel combustion are trash. ...

I think they need to step up,..."

Society can't depend on the free market to control pollution. The only solution is for the public and their governments to adopt science-based regulations and guidance, and weaken the influence of all special interest groups on governement policy. This is not what some environmentalists wants to hear (as they are also a special interest group), but the alternative is likely to be worse.